Alternate Absolution
by Albino Magpie
Summary: When eating poison, lick the plate. Manga-based Angstshipping, written for a contest.


_Alter (noun): An alter is the scientific name for any number of quasi-seperate personalities that a person suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder may develop. They are created unconsciously to deal with trauma or negative thoughts._

_Fugue (noun): A period of time which can not be remembered afterwards. Commonly a symptom of DID, depersonalization, derealization and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder._

* * *

><p>First he had given what was left of his innocence to defy his purpose. Then he had fulfilled it, against all better judgement and only because there was nothing else left to do. And now he simply did not have any innocence, judgement or purpose left.<p>

"Hah, that's not a positive thought," Malik admonished himself, trying to remember what he had learned, "Positive affirmations. You're free."

But that sounded hardly convincing, especially in his own, shaky tone that he used to think out loud.

"Being free might be frightening," a voice said to his right, and he looked over, a bit shocked.

Bakura Ryou had placed his elbows on the railing, thin hands clasped together, looking like he hadn't slept in weeks. There was a bruise on his cheek, and he was smiling in a vague way.

His expression was..wary, though it seemed less at Malik himself and more tense in general.

The tension of waiting for something bad to happen. It came naturally, with people like them.

He had been and was like Malik, though different. That much he knew.

But there was something else about him, something almost guileless.

It wasn't like the wary forgiveness the Pharaoh's medium presented him with. It took Malik a moment to realize what he was looking at, but when he did, he had to steady himself from the shock. It was ignorance.

Ryou had a blank slate where memories, too harmful to keep, were wiped out or had simply not been created. A fugue that protected him from himself.

Malik thought of blackboards and chalk and names chipped from cartouches.

And then he saw, big enough to almost eclipse the bleakness he had been feeling, the terrible idea.

He was selfish, there was no denying that. And he would always be.

So suppose he do one more selfish thing, just by never saying anything and allowing this meeting to be their first instead of an ill-fated continuation?

Selfish.

But Ryou was luckier than he knew. If Malik'd had the gift of amnesia, everything might have been different. But forgetfulness, once a scourge, had decided to bless him with its absence.

He leaned back against the railing, the murky green waters of Egypt's artery swirling twenty feet below him.

The chance to talk to someone who might understand one word out of ten that he said. Someone who knew what missing chunks of his memory was like.

_Do, or die._

"If you could have one thing in the world, what would it be?" he asked, out of the blue, and for a moment it felt completely natural. There had never been crime and harm and mindfucking, there were only two outsiders gravitating together and finding common ground.

His homeland was spread out around him, making him think he wanted to stay forever or else run like hell and never come back.

Ryou gave him the strangest look, then glanced at his feet. He shrugged his shoulders under the thin cotton shirt; his arms were sunburned already. The black coat was absent.

"I don't know. A direction, maybe. Everyone on here," he moved his arms, the gestures taking in the whole of the ship, taking in the situation, "everyone is asking themselves, 'What now?'"

"What now, indeed. I suppose-" he could do this, he would take Ryou's unconscious offering, and he'd be damned if – actually, he was probably damned either way. The old skills hadn't rusted, and he was gleeful and terrified at how easy it was to mimic that light-heartedness again.

"I suppose you'll go back to school?"

He was still apt at draining the emotion from his voice and replacing it with something more appropiate. He could do this, if he wanted. He could gain trust.

"Won't you? You had some problems too, I think..?"

The question hook was tentative, and Malik felt something like vague wonderment. The boy had no idea at all about his...problems?

_Sure, if you consider no formal education at all a problem, then I have a few._

"Yes, that's-"

He broke off.

Ryou leaned next to him and there was talk of his sister (Couldn't she find you something, I've heard she has a good position) and it _was_ an option but then it wasn't.

He couldn't just spend his entire lifetime choked with dust and ancient history. He wouldn't.

Even Isis, who'd always been the one to follow the rules where he broke them, even she now carried her disobedience to the tombkeepers' last commandment under her heart.

Malik looked at the Nile and thought of another river that Isis had told him about, the one that promised forgetfulness.

Finding Lethe, losing his memories. Was that his new life's goal?

Ryou was taller than he held himself, but not by much.

And Malik breathed in, closing his eyes for a moment. And it came back, harder than before.

* * *

><p>Now there was something different. The sharpness had vanished from his face.<p>

It might have been unconsciousness that wiped away the angles and blurred the clear-cut lines into a softness of focus, disconcertingly different from what he'd seen moments before.

But it wasn't unconsciousness. At least, it was not only that.

The alter was gone.

_He_ hadn't used that word, mind. Had referred to himself obscurely and with drawn-out spiritual phrases and excessive uses of words like 'host' but not, it should be noted, 'parasite'.

Still, Malik had seen the signs and he knew enough of it to – he knew enough to break that thought off, brutally, imagining a bone-flower that grew from his brain up into the stratosphere being ripped out at the roots. Leaving a bleeding hole in the brain matter/soil.

Thoughts could be like that.

Like tender little flowers that suddenly revealed thorns that left you bloody all over and roots that wrapped around your head and choked you to death.

And that's why you either withered up and died or left a little patch out for the weeds.

And all those were thoughts that had to be uprooted, too. The quicker, the better.

There was a very much unconscious boy on the ground in front of him. Those were not matters he usually dealt in - or at least, the people lying bleeding on the ground in front of him weren't usually so attractive.

But this was not the place for these thoughts. Those were not his thoughts.

A very white body. Still in unconsciousness and conspicuous because of all the blood.

The alter might have struck a vein.

The ghouls were standing on the sidelines around him. Not attentive, because a tool isn't attentive. Nor where they waiting. It was fascinating even if you knew how it worked.

Malik could have walked up to one of them and just torn his face clean off, starting at the jaw and working his way upwards. The man would not have moved a muscle.

Which isn't to say that Malik had tried this. But he was reasonably sure of it.

What he did instead do was tear off most of one man's shirt, which was likely looking.

He did not want this Bakura Ryou to bleed to death. That really wouldn't do.

The weeds of thought flourishing in his mind, he walked over to the still unconscious boy and leaned over him, knees on either side, examining the wound.

The epidermis and dermis had been cut through. Malik could see the fatty layer underneath, at least slightly, where it wasn't obscured in blood. It was not quite a pretty sight.

But the wound had to be dressed and treated – inexpertly, at least - if he was going to fake the face of a nice helpful person. His hands would have to get bloody for the sake of it.

His hands already were bloody.

Malik gave the wound a few perfunctorily wipes with a piece of dress shirt.

The boy lay there like a corpse. His closed eyes, a hint of the epicanthic fold in the inner corners, lay in bruise-purple hollows. His lips were an off-skin colour, just a bit darker than his cheeks, and they looked cold.

The ghouls were looking on impassively.

Malik could have gone and ripped their skin off, and none would have complained.

He leaned down until he was just almost touching the boy's face. From this close he could feel his breath, proof of life, against his lips. He got that little bit closer, and stole.

There was neither coldness nor sweetness, even though he had expected it. There was just a passing feeling of softness that nevertheless scraped his nerves raw as concrete would have done.

There was something low and red-hot-raw about it, however soft and cold it might seem to kiss a ghost or a corpse.

And just like they ignored everything but a direct command, the ghouls ignored this.

But it was not right. It did not fit this part of him to kiss the sleeping-as-if-dead. It was a weed that had to be uprooted. A piece of his body to be amputated.

Still, something had been lit in his stomach and along his spine.

He had taken something, and he could use his boy. His alter had agreed, the one whose face had been so sharp. There was no wall, then. No you-may-not-do-this.

Malik found that while his lips had left the place they were in, his hand was curled around the boy's arm. The blood had long since soaked through the piece of cloth and soaked into his hand, through his porous flesh and right into his bones.

Malik pushed the cloth away and put his fingers right on the wound, aware that this was more violatingly intimate than a kiss could have ever been.

_A way out. Insurance. Someone to use._

(He would always use others to further himself, but he must not enjoy it. That part belonged somewhere else. That part belonged in the fenced-off patch where things grew, without supervision.)

And his fingers worried the wound, for a moment traversing the barrier between where one body ended and the other began. And it was even more of a scraped-raw feeling even though, or because, his stomach felt so hollow now.

And then he made a crude sort of tourniquet out of the scrap of cloth. It would hold out until he'd bluffed his way into gaining trust.

It would work.

* * *

><p>"So what<em> is<em> it that you want most?"

They had settled down on the deck, talking. It should not have been this easy.

If there was any fairness in the world, people should not be making it this easy for him. Ryou should not be making this easy for him.

What he wanted most, right now, what he'd give his life to get?

"I – I don't know. I really don't," he lied.

There was a new life and a new day but what there wasn't were answers and directions.

Malik would just have to jump and hope for the best. He didn't have much practice at hoping for the best.

"You know," Ryou started, "it's a new era. A new aeon."

Funny he should say that.

It was a fact that both of them where now not complete but depleted, rid of an unwanted side of themselves and also rid of the place to put everything undesirable.

So was that the reason they could talk so easily, as if nothing was out-of-place on this ship?

As if none of them were mediums, seers, former thugs or aspiring dancers or murderers or people suddenly down one split personality?

What did they _want_?

Malik looked up, having missed a part of the conversation. He was being offered a hand, which was odd enough on its own. Indecision, a chance at redemption or one to damn him further -

He took it.

Ryou's hands, looking for all the world like white spiders, were a lot stronger than they looked.

He had a veritable death grip, actually.

"Now," he said, with that accent that couldn't figure out where it came from, "I think there's dinner down under deck."

Dinner?

He could pretend that the last time they'd had dinner together had been a fugue, that he couldn't remember a second of it.

Except that he could.

* * *

><p>It had worked.<p>

No more than something so crudely improvised should have. There was a minimum of trust, but it'd be enough. While the group around the pharaoh's medium were still wary, they did not expect a knife in their backs.

Not from _Nam_, who had taken the name from the scriptures and would never, ever hesitate to stab.

And now they'd left the ground. He liked it, flying. He liked the thin air

Work, it seemed, had been left to the alter. The – as much as that word could ever be applicable – original was called Bakura Ryou, and he was not aware of the fact that he was now ten thousand feet in the air.

He was not aware of much of anything.

Towards other people, the alter piloted and made the necessary small talk.

But now there where just the two-three-four of them, and it seemed the original would not move beyond a few confused steps, locked away in derealization, un-aware.

The alter, sharper and louder and a thousand million times more expressive than his so-called host in constant stupor, spoke with Malik.

He had not gone in deep after the first subconscious visit – hoping to encounter Bakura Ryou and instead finding the alter, who claimed name Bakura for himself.

But he could hear the voice and see the thin white body in the cabin that wasn't his own, with eyes that were not his own.

"He doesn't feel hungry, he just doesn't," the alter said, sounding irritated more than anything else, "but I do."

Malik didn't feel it. But then he allowed himself to sink in deeper, to claim the body's physical sensations a his own. The hunger was there but it did not reach Bakura Ryou's mind. Not much did, and nothing got out.

Malik allowed himself to feel hunger pangs and the sharp feeling of an inflamed flesh wound. It was more intense than he had thought it'd be.

"And if my host dies of hunger, where does that put me?"

Malik was only half-listening, but he understood the reasoning. Complete dissociation. No recognizable connection. White noise where two sides where meant to fade into each other.

And he was looking down on Bakura Ryou at the same time as looking out from his his eyes. This gave him a kind of split-screen view as the alter Bakura piloted the body.

The catering had been provided to each room. This was where he was supposed to get out.

This was breaking a sort of rule. The strictest kind, because it was self-imposed.

But it was not his body.

He was not moving anything. He was just watching.

Malik looked down at hands that were not his own from eyes that didn't belong to him, cutting a slab of meat into small, dripping pieces.

He _ought_ to get out of this.

His other eyes, not in _this_ head either but not in his head either, showed a face so impassive that _empty_ and _dead_ might be the words he should rather use.

His lips had touched those lips, even though he'd been close to forgetting. Tried to forget.

And now a piece of meat was touching those lips, dripping reddish-brown.

He had seen Bakura Ryou with his eyes closed, and he would rather his eyes be closed, now.

He had not looked so dead, out cold on the ground with blood pouring from his arm.

But with his mouth moving like an automaton and his throat bulging as he swallowed and his eyes doing nothing at all, he looked dead.

Malik had made a choice, a conscious choice to set himself apart from where he came from. He did not eat meat. Except for now. By proxy.

He was scared. He was so, so scared about the sleeping child he'd kissed being close to dead now and locked so deeply into a fugue.

But the scared was a _weed_, a terrible bone-flower that had to be torn out. A thought that he didn't permit. The scared was for someone else to deal with.

When eating poison, lick the plate.

* * *

><p>There were a great many things that he hadn't done before, and getting drunk was one of them.<p>

He _had _drunk alcohol before, but this was the first time that Malik was really, honestly wasted.

It was also the first time he had let himself be dragged into a strange bedroom in his drunken state and was just now trying to figure out what exactly he should be doing, aside from being extremely startled.

Ryou had, after dinner and under the influence of the better part of a bottle of wine, had pushed him into a random wall with a _thump _noise and kissed him before Malik could figure out that he was not, in fact, being attacked.

Falling over each other onto a quite convenient couch in Ryou's room was suddenly the logical conclusion, even though he wasn't quite sure how he'd gotten there.

Ryou held on to his shoulders, his hands again a lot stronger than they looked.

They had both lost their shirts in the past ten minutes. The scar on Ryou's arm had keloided and was as wide as the wound had been deep.

Malik tried to do something useful with his hands.

It didn't quite work out, because he found that he couldn't do better than hold on to the couch for dear life. Ryou had apparently found that he liked tugging on his earring with his teeth.

"If you could have one thing in the world," Ryou ran his hands over Malik's chest, and cupped them around his shoulders, "what would it be?"

Malik laughed drunkenly, as it seemed they had found a game to play. Then he gently but firmly dislodged the white-spider hands when they threatened to slip between the couch and his back.

He didn't exactly know where to put them, but it seemed that Ryou did know.

He leaned in closer and pulled their clasped fingers between their bodies, his other hand moving off to the side.

"And what would it be, for you?" Malik asked instead of an answer, wondering how in the world he had gotten here.

There was a black hole of guilt beyond his breastbone, testament to the fact that he was taking advantage of Ryou's ignorance. But the dampening feeling of alcohol and lust were capable to fill any hole at least a little. _8When eating poison, _Malik thought,)

"I want," Ryou's hand was really much stronger than it looked,

(he let his head fall back, _lick the plate_.)

"Revenge."

And Ryou's other hand was holding a knife to his throat.

Malik opened his eyes.

He had not been expecting this. He had expected them to drift apart and talk occasionally and he'd expected himself to one day tell the whole miserable story (at least, he'd hoped that some day he would).

The shock turned him all but sober, even though that was probably not true and he was just too drunk to notice how drunk he really was.

But something lifted. The black hole filled itself up, rapidly, so fast that it surprised him.

And Ryou was looking at him in the most curious way. Not empty any more, and not with a mask on.

He should have known about the mask. He should have been ashamed of himself for not noticing the ignorance to be an act, but somehow he couldn't muster the energy. Somehow, he was relieved.

Besides, Ryou still had two hands, one of which wasn't holding a knife.

"So tell me what you want," he repeated, making clear with the knife's point that this was not play and could become serious soon. Even more serious.

And then something happened. The constant thought divide that had survived even the death of his alter vanished. It wasn't a grand affair. It was the integration of too many viewpoints into just one.

And Ryou raised his eyebrows, waiting for his answer.

And Malik knew exactly what he wanted. He drew a deep breath down to his diaphragm and closed his eyes and tilted his head back as far as it would go. Exposing his throat.

Ryou moved his hand.

_Absolution._

**A/N: **I hope the timejumpishness has been conveyed. If not, I fail. So sorry._  
><em>


End file.
